TalenLee

As Yet Untitled Work

I'm Talen! I make videos and articles and games and graphic designs and guides and messes and encouragement. Chances are you can find anything I do on my blog. I like it when you comment on my things, so please do!


The way I think about privilege is that it's an external thing. People don't 'have' privilege, people interface with privilege. Privilege is a system external to you, and if the system decides to respond to you, then you get what the system provides, and if it decides not to, then you don't. It's why a deep voice on the phone can get you better service, because the system, in its headless foolishness, has decided that that voice has access to a tier of privilege.

It's not that you have this wellspring of privilege bubbling up inside you, it's that there's an incredibly shitty card reader everywhere, and it constantly scans you and it just so happens, oh, here, you are getting the benefits of this. But you may not want those benefits, but the system doesn't know that. It happens even when you're interacting with a person, because the person is ceding their choices and behaviour, typically, to the system.

There's no masc privilege in the middle of a cornfield. It needs to have the system, with its removal from humans making choices, with its ability to offer rewards and incentives.

There are days I have been misgendered. The system did not correctly recognise me, based entirely on a ponytail. The system's failure to identify a cis boy is, to the system, a hiccup, but if you believe that you believe the system is reliable and consistent and builds its respones out of good data. It's not. It made what was to me a mistake, but how many people do you think responded to the incident with a mollifying 'well you do have long hair.'

Privilege isn't a thing that you got at birth like a fuckin' care package, it's an ongoing engagement with a system that has integrated itself into every part of your life and it needs to do that so it can properly deny and refuse a lot of you in day to day ways for not being the Right Thing the privilege is meant to handle.

(This applies also to 'whiteness' and the like - these are external systems of control through reward and punishment.)


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in reply to @TalenLee's post:

yes, absolutely! I think a term that's helped clarify this for me is "uptake", which is basically how people interpret the signifiers u bring into the world. a simple example: maybe I do my hair up in a little ponytail and someone sees it and thinks "oh what a cute girlstyle", that is their moment of "taking up" what I've put into the world. and of course like you're saying, this is regardless of my intent! often when I do a ponytail people are like "wow very 80s, very jazzercise!" which is not what I am trying to put out, but that's how they interpret it!
Another piece I think that you're kinda missing here is something I might call "positionality", which is for instance the ways that wealth or cultural position have impacts on what experiences and possibilities you have access to, which is (certainly related to but) a bit different from what's contained in your definition of privilege

It is true, I am describing a very, very vague top-down way to think of it, like, it's an incomplete model. I just want to get people out of the headspace of thinking of 'privilege' as something innate and born into them, and not something extended to them by a system outside themselves.